As big data rolled in, the 78-year-old NBA franchise migrated its tech stack from CTO Jay Wessland’s back office to AWS infrastructure. Wh...
When Boston Celtics CTO Jay Wessland began working with the National Basketball Association team in 1990, the age of big data was still a ways off — especially in the professional sports arena.
It would be six years before digital data was cheaper than paper and another six until Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics rode analytics through the storybook season writer Michael Lewis documented in his 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”
Modernization for the Celtics in the 1990s meant collecting basic data on a courtside computer, a practice that took hold only after Wessland arrived. When the now 78-year-old NBA franchise appointed Wessland director of technology in 2000, the IT hadn’t advanced much further. The organization promoted him to CTO in 2016.
“I couldn’t imagine why a pro sports team would even need a CTO but, in today’s world, everything revolves around the tech stack and technology,” Wessland said last month, during a virtual event marking the near-completion of his organization’s six-year journey to cloud.
Professional sports, like any other big business, is a data-driven, IT-dependent enterprise, where elastic compute and scalable storage deliver a competitive edge — on and off the court. Cloud modernization has become table stakes, from banking to basketball.
“It’s now way past an SQL server and a web server that I could build myself,” Wessler said. “We need a lot of help to do this.”
The Celtics moved quickly to cloud in 2017, choosing AWS as its primary provider. The initial lift-and-shift took months, not years, according to Jonathan LaCour, CTO at Mission Cloud, the AWS consulting service that managed the migration.
“Technically speaking, 99% of the infrastructure was moved out of on-prem,” LaCour said in an interview with CIO Dive.
That’s when the real work of refactoring legacy applications, rationalizing data estates and optimizing the tech stack began. “Modernization and refinement have been happening continuously ever since,” LaCour said.
The data tipping point
Digital transformation isn’t a one-and-done endeavor. Untended technical debt haunts cloud deployments, undermining efficiency and ballooning costs. Organizations that lack a sound cloud business strategy or migration plan can’t squint hard enough to see the ROI.
“People can get into a situation where they do a migration and then just let it sit there and they become unsatisfied” LaCour said. “If you’re running your data center workload in a cloud, that’s not the way to save money.”
Wessland had a relatively small IT group and decades of data to migrate from infrastructure he’d built from the ground up.
“We ran everything on Windows in our own data center — if you could call it a data center,” he said. “It was actually the room behind my office with a couple racks.”
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